The old man was halfway through his meal when the boy dropped to his knees in front of him

The clock on the dashboard of a stolen delivery van clicked toward 11:15 PM as Arthur navigated the vehicle through the industrial service gates behind the Vance Bio-Tech complex.

“How did you get past the perimeter gate?” Julian asked from the passenger seat, watching security cameras pivot uselessly overhead.

“Because the security AI still runs on the legacy subroutines I wrote twenty years ago,” Arthur replied, tapping a sequence of keys on the laptop he had salvaged from the bunker. “I programmed a permanent administrative override for the delivery docks—a backdoor that Marcus was too arrogant to ever audit.”

The heavy steel garage doors of the sub-basement freight elevator groaned upward, revealing a sterile, fluorescent-lit loading bay devoid of human guards.

Arthur cut the engine, the silence inside the van heavy and suffocating. He turned to look at Julian and the children in the back seat.

“Listen to me very carefully,” Arthur said, his voice softer now, stripped of its corporate harshness. “Once we step out of this van, there’s no turning back. Marcus will be on level four in the cryogenic lab. We have to move fast, strike hard, and stay together.”

Julian nodded, adjusting the blanket around the sleeping infant. “We're ready, Mr. Vance.”

They stepped out of the van onto the polished concrete floor of the loading bay. Arthur led the way toward the freight elevator, swiping his old master badge against the optical scanner on the wall.